they're the first real project I've seen actually attempting a seamless replacement of the failed experiment (IMO) that is X.
You're joking, right? I can probably name more attempted X replacements than I have fingers. Berlin is the most infamous, but the others are numerous.
All of them are good ideas (especially since they mostly aimed for the same idea), but in real life, better network transparency just isn't compelling enough to halt the attraction towards Microsoft/Apple style graphics code.
This is a good idea, and both Windows and to a lesser extent OS X have it already.
Please explain how Microsoft Windows has it to even the slightest extent.
As far as I can tell, each Windows application comes with its own custom installer/uninstaller (except when they don't). You can't say "Windows has it" when the feature isn't supplied by the OS but by each individual app.
The only minor amount of support Windows gives is a list where "installed uninstallers" can register themselves to show up in Add/Remove programs.
standardised method of package management that at MINIMUM can support the same features that Windows XP/2000 has today.
Again, I'm completely at a loss to find any package management features in Windows. Is this something new for XP? To me it looks like installers just copy whatever files they need to C:\Progra~1 and C:\Windows\System32 and be done with it. (It's really a little more sophisticated, as there's a level of indirection to allow for i18n and drives other than C:, but thats barely notable).
The reason Microsoft Windows often doesn't exhibit the symptoms of poor/nonexistent package management is there's only one provider for the OS, so the layout differences between two Windows installs are trivial compared to how a SUSE and Gentoo box might differ (while both being viable Linux desktop systems)
don't have access to the hardware doesn't mean you can't write the program
But Ada never wrote a program. Occasionally Babbage would walk her through the steps to create a hypothetical program, but she was no more a programmer than Plato's Meno was a mathematician.
Can you really hold up Star Trek and Babylon 5 as examples of good science fiction?
I don't think B5 ever even tried to be science fiction. It's strongly fantasy. Highly tolkienesque, actually.
However, I believe Firefly was really a drama (with a touch of action). The only genuine science fiction TV shows have been non-sequential series like Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. (Rare episodes of Star Trek were science fiction) Prehaps with time Firefly would've evolved science fiction aspects, but that's never seemed to be Whedon's interest.
No, they're given one episode per season where the permanent cast is allowed to temporarily become interesting. On one single day, one cop's wife gets cancer, the other's daughter is murdered, one lawyer is tried for ethics violations, and the other is voted out of office...
That's future DRM of course. Everything is reference-counted.
To protect intellectual property, no data file can be copied without the original being deleted in the same step. Each digital file is bound to a small bit of plastic which serves both as your license to possess that file, and the transport medium to move it around (with a handy 2cm preview of the file's contents)
It might seem inconvenient to maintain the sneakernet in the face of so much tech, but it keeps officeworkers performing a minimum amount of exercise...
Except that it's not a criminal justice issue, it's an issue for sports leagues to decide.
Anything involving discrimination, including against the physically disabled, is fair game for the Federal Gvt. (And if the TV show assumes a Bush victory this year and extrapolates from there, they might feature a more controlling legal system than we have today)
Besides, the US Senate has already injected itself into baseball's discussion on performance-enhancement...
not malicious and are not using a hacked compiler.
You dismiss competency, but it's really very important. Well-meaning, non-malicious people can still make mistakes. But even if you wrongly trust an evil application vendor, his program still shouldn't be able to run rampant over the machine.
That is especially important for multi-user computers. Would Unix (or any conncurrent-user system) be at all successful if a bad application run by one user could corrupt work other users are doing? cf "privilege escalation exploit".
Surely getting that right... is easier than securing 100+ different system-call handlers in a kernel like Linux!
Imperical evidence has trivially proven the opposite.
Its analagous to the problem of guaranteeing that a given e-mail originated from a certain person.
No it isn't. When verifying email origination, you need only determine the sender's identity, not his competency.
There are already products distributed as signed binaries, and bugs+exploits have already crept in, meaning the release shouldn't have been signed at all. Unix (and other systems) have a principle "Be liberal in what you accept", meaning that a computer shouldn't entirely crash if a malicious enemy sends an evil program.
at install-time wouldn't be problematic.
That's reasonable, and is similar to how Java JIT works (but with longer-term caching). But it still introduces a huge practical problem in comparison to modern OSes: a mistake in the compiler used for a high-level application can cause mysterious system-wide failures.
Today, regardless of how wrong the compiler's author might be, it'll only crash his own program, not stomp on other user's memory (or the kernel).
You are in a way proposing that compiler innovation be shutdown, because in your scheme it would be too risky to allow it to be changed. (Have you tried Intel's P4 compiler? Seen how often it is absolutely wrong? And that's with C, a simpler language to compile)
I have no philosophical objection to your position, but it is utopian. The gains would never outweigh the horrendous costs to switch away from "good enough" OSes.
"Taiwan is not a country" is a lie repeated by as a matter of policy by certain high-ranking government officials to mollify the Chinese authorities. (Although calling it a "lie" is an exaggeration, because they don't really expect to fool anyone). President Bush got into some trouble once when he forgot to lie and mentioned on TV that Taiwan is a country.
It isn't "officially" a Chinese province any more than Kuwait was officially Iraqi territory in 1991. Somebody far away yelling that he owns your stuff has no real effect on ownership.
they've always been the most ardent supporters of Linux on the PDA
How can they possibly be the "most ardent" supporters when they don't ship PDAs with Linux installed? Other companies have done so, including Sharp, Agenda, and Yopy, meaning Compaq cannot possibly be in the top 3 supporters.
The code would be signed by the compiler. It is assumed that the compiler is trusted, just as, in a traditional model, it is assumed that the kernel in trusted.
What a ridiculus position. The kernel is assumed trusted because it is on your computer. The compiler is not on your computer, so it can't be trusted.
Or are you proposing that the all software should be distributed as source/intermediate code, and that only the OS kernel is allowed to invoke a local compiler on it before running?
but the MS PR machine will spin it around and make consumers think that it will make their computers secure
That's it! The reason why Microsoft has left Outlook full of known security holes for 4 straight years is to build up public frustration at "untrusted computing" so they'll have an eager market to adopt DRM!
That kind of ignorance is seriously dangerous. Linus himself has explained this topic in detail.
How would they force you to use such a thing?
They (the Evil Giant Corporation) compile Linux for you, and send you the kernel image (either included with the computer, or downloaded as a later upgrade). They have computed a cryptographic signature for that kernel, and transmitted it to the DRM chip (which only they can control, not you).
That chip will only load a kernel if the signature matches- if the kernel is on a short list of approved kernels. The corporation can still give the Linux source code to their users (as required by GPL), but those users cannot then edit+recompile+run the kernel, because it'll be rejected by the DRM chip.
Therefore one of the major benefits of Free/OpenSource software has been killed by DRM (and the new federal laws that make DRM possible)
PS. That's only half of the way they "force you to use the thing". The other half is the propagation of trust from hardware to kernel to application, which should be obvious if you read the EFF pages.
The idea of providing each computer with a secure cryptographic ID of some sort is pretty valuable to anyone concerned with security just as well as media distributors.
Not really. The threats faced by media corporations (who want their songs not to be traded) and individuals+businesses (who want their secrets not to be exposed) are too different for one solution to help both.
Any kind of "Trusted" hardware can be subverted or circumvented by a dedicated person with physical access. That won't bother big publishers, who only need to ensure that copying a song takes more effort than actually buying another, because the monetary damage from a single violation is small.
But if the transmission of secret schematics for your business is intercepted, the damage from that one incident can be enormous- enough to make it profitable for the criminals to spend a few weeks hacking hardware to accomplsih it.
If you depend on "Trusted Computing" to protect your secrets, then you're placing yourself at risk. If you only depend on it to retard the propagation of information you've already published, then you're reducing risk (not eliminating).
It's rather likely that if people start "Trusting" their computers to be protected, they'll rely less on passwords, and it'll be more common for a stolen laptop precipitating a full corporate download. Each computer already has a unique ID: the MAC address. Nobody uses it as part of any security schemes, because remote systems can never be trusted to honestly tell their ID.
there's nothing inherently wrong with using proprietary communication protocols, especially when they're being used by a for-profit company.
That's where you're most completely wrong. Using a proprietary protocol is absolutelyinherentlybad. Especially if you're not in big business, but the millitary. I don't have time/space here to fully explain (but the links give clues), and others have written volumes.
practical reasons to not use this software do include the presence of DRM
Neither X_Bones nor Saeed al-Sahaf has given any explanation as to why DRM is impractical. In another thread it was pointed out that Saeed al-Sahaf's reaction to DRM was hardly more than an ingrained revulsion to a hated acroynym. (He immediately Godwinned)
I can think of one reason why DRM might be a negative (beyond the fact that it implies a proprietary protocol), and that is that it probably won't completely work. Users expecting protections that aren't really there may put themselves at risk. But maybe you can give some better reasons.
lot of money for something you yourself said could be done in an hour
In case you didn't pick up on this, Groove is bloatware, and only 15% of its features are needed by a normal user.
Here, I'll write one line that encompasses 60% of the features an average user needs from Groove. 25 6 * * * user rsync -e ssh user@ourproj.dyndns.org:/home/gruv/data ~user/gruv/data;chmod -R -w ~user/gruv
The other 40% functionality can be accomplished by 20-40 more lines. But of course then one more challenge is faced: convincing the network admin to allow ssh traffic. If he's smart this is already done, but if he's stupid it's impossible. So then one must turn to one of the many how-tos explaining how to pierce overly-restrictive firewalls. (It's quite funny that the main reason people are installing Groove is that it subverts their firewalls)
(even though the necessary tools are freely available on that platform, and better yet aren't tied to it)
First, I think I'd need an actual Microsoft Windows, which is non-free (and in fact 299 dollars). The.Net 7.x compiler system is also rather pricey, but I could squeak by with gcc prehaps.
But then for every other user, the necessary additional tools are sshd, crond, and python. I could convince an average Windows user to install maybe one of those, but not all of them.
How about the fact that it includes Windows DRM? Or that it's just another arm of the Borg? That it's probibly just as insecure as Windows?
Do you know how goofy you sound, dismissing my practical reasons and then spitting out stereotypical Slashbot-isms? And you ignored my most important reason, the lock-in to an undocumented protocol.
Ther is nothing wrong with charging for software, and nothing wrong with building apps for Windows.
Ther is something wrong with charging a lot for software that does nothing I couldn't accomplish in an hour of python scripting around ssh. The needed functionality is so easy to achieve (since the tough part, the security, is handled by existing software) that chances are somebody else has already given away a free implementation. That's what I'm asking about.
If I were inclined to touch Windows programming, I might do it myself...
And if you regularly pirate software to use on government contracts, I'm happy they're locking you out.
Of course I never "pirate" software, I can hardly swim. And I don't infringe software copyrights either, as should've been evident by my attachment to "Free" distributions. But it's not up to me, it's up to the Pentagon LTs and CLs who carry the authority on these things.
The government IT people just can't handle license keys satisfactorily.
It's not the money... it's the actual holding onto the keys that they just can't do. They'll happily pay $40,000 to get software "improved" to include their requirements, then only be able to buy the $500 keys one month out of the year because their budgets have to be pre-allocated. Of course, they still have 4 keys left over from projects that've shut down, but they can't reassign them to another department because that'd be too much paperwork.
It doesn't matter if the per-seat cost was $5/year. The existence of a license at all is a real impediment to productivity. Don't even get me started on trying to install Product Activation-style license enforcement inside a top-secret lab!
"Uh no, I can't tell you my ip address or CPU uid. Well, I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you..."
dominated early on because they were better business machines.
IBMs were better business machines per dollar... back when the prime business apps were Lotus123 and dBase (plus later WordPerfect). Their main advantage over the Apple side was that a system with a hard drive (10-20 meg at first) was seriously less $$$ than for a similar Mac.
In terms of both graphics and processing, no competitor even approached the Commodore Amiga until the Intel 386 came out in 1985. But 386 PCs were still worse than Mac or Amiga, and more importantly, PC games able to take best advantage of the 32-bit 386 didn't come out until the 90s. By then, the 66 mhz 486 was out, and the "IBM Compatible PC" finally pulled (temporaily) ahead.
Some god-forsaken police or fire department leader is going to get saddled with yet another fraglie and tempermental piece of battery-dependent equipment that will serve only to force him to talk to higher-echelon bureaucrats instead of doing his job.
The uses won't be nearly as ambitious. They won't push it that far. It'll serve as nothing more than a propaganda-pusher for the DHS. Each Friday at 16:00 the chief will spend a few minutes seeing what new and informative safety hints the feds have stuffed onto his hard drive that week.
It's a grandiose newsletter-engine, nothing more will come of it.
Slashdot Mirror
they're the first real project I've seen actually attempting a seamless replacement of the failed experiment (IMO) that is X.
You're joking, right? I can probably name more attempted X replacements than I have fingers. Berlin is the most infamous, but the others are numerous.
All of them are good ideas (especially since they mostly aimed for the same idea), but in real life, better network transparency just isn't compelling enough to halt the attraction towards Microsoft/Apple style graphics code.
This is a good idea, and both Windows and to a lesser extent OS X have it already.
Please explain how Microsoft Windows has it to even the slightest extent.
As far as I can tell, each Windows application comes with its own custom installer/uninstaller (except when they don't). You can't say "Windows has it" when the feature isn't supplied by the OS but by each individual app.
The only minor amount of support Windows gives is a list where "installed uninstallers" can register themselves to show up in Add/Remove programs.
standardised method of package management that at MINIMUM can support the same features that Windows XP/2000 has today.
Again, I'm completely at a loss to find any package management features in Windows. Is this something new for XP? To me it looks like installers just copy whatever files they need to C:\Progra~1 and C:\Windows\System32 and be done with it. (It's really a little more sophisticated, as there's a level of indirection to allow for i18n and drives other than C:, but thats barely notable).
The reason Microsoft Windows often doesn't exhibit the symptoms of poor/nonexistent package management is there's only one provider for the OS, so the layout differences between two Windows installs are trivial compared to how a SUSE and Gentoo box might differ (while both being viable Linux desktop systems)
Traditional downloads will suck up as much bandwidth as possible as well.
Traditional downloads stop when you've got the whole file. Bittorrents will keep sending and sending as long as anyone else is downloading.
If you don't sit there waiting for the end (or have an alternate client), then the usage is unbounded.
Yes it is, according to both governments.
Both Taiwan and the PRC call themselves "China", but one of them is correct and the other is pathetically wishful.
But while Taiwan considers itself to be China, it doesn't claim any affiliation with the governmental entity known as "China" to the world.
no one dares to piss them off by supporting Taiwan independence.
George W. Bush surely dares that.
don't have access to the hardware doesn't mean you can't write the program
But Ada never wrote a program. Occasionally Babbage would walk her through the steps to create a hypothetical program, but she was no more a programmer than Plato's Meno was a mathematician.
Can you really hold up Star Trek and Babylon 5 as examples of good science fiction?
I don't think B5 ever even tried to be science fiction. It's strongly fantasy. Highly tolkienesque, actually.
However, I believe Firefly was really a drama (with a touch of action). The only genuine science fiction TV shows have been non-sequential series like Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. (Rare episodes of Star Trek were science fiction) Prehaps with time Firefly would've evolved science fiction aspects, but that's never seemed to be Whedon's interest.
they're told to go stuff themselves.
No, they're given one episode per season where the permanent cast is allowed to temporarily become interesting. On one single day, one cop's wife gets cancer, the other's daughter is murdered, one lawyer is tried for ethics violations, and the other is voted out of office...
That's future DRM of course. Everything is reference-counted.
To protect intellectual property, no data file can be copied without the original being deleted in the same step. Each digital file is bound to a small bit of plastic which serves both as your license to possess that file, and the transport medium to move it around (with a handy 2cm preview of the file's contents)
It might seem inconvenient to maintain the sneakernet in the face of so much tech, but it keeps officeworkers performing a minimum amount of exercise...
Except that it's not a criminal justice issue, it's an issue for sports leagues to decide.
Anything involving discrimination, including against the physically disabled, is fair game for the Federal Gvt. (And if the TV show assumes a Bush victory this year and extrapolates from there, they might feature a more controlling legal system than we have today)
Besides, the US Senate has already injected itself into baseball's discussion on performance-enhancement...
not malicious and are not using a hacked compiler.
... is easier than securing 100+ different system-call handlers in a kernel like Linux!
You dismiss competency, but it's really very important. Well-meaning, non-malicious people can still make mistakes. But even if you wrongly trust an evil application vendor, his program still shouldn't be able to run rampant over the machine.
That is especially important for multi-user computers. Would Unix (or any conncurrent-user system) be at all successful if a bad application run by one user could corrupt work other users are doing? cf "privilege escalation exploit".
Surely getting that right
Imperical evidence has trivially proven the opposite.
Its analagous to the problem of guaranteeing that a given e-mail originated from a certain person.
No it isn't. When verifying email origination, you need only determine the sender's identity, not his competency.
There are already products distributed as signed binaries, and bugs+exploits have already crept in, meaning the release shouldn't have been signed at all. Unix (and other systems) have a principle "Be liberal in what you accept", meaning that a computer shouldn't entirely crash if a malicious enemy sends an evil program.
at install-time wouldn't be problematic.
That's reasonable, and is similar to how Java JIT works (but with longer-term caching). But it still introduces a huge practical problem in comparison to modern OSes: a mistake in the compiler used for a high-level application can cause mysterious system-wide failures.
Today, regardless of how wrong the compiler's author might be, it'll only crash his own program, not stomp on other user's memory (or the kernel).
You are in a way proposing that compiler innovation be shutdown, because in your scheme it would be too risky to allow it to be changed. (Have you tried Intel's P4 compiler? Seen how often it is absolutely wrong? And that's with C, a simpler language to compile)
I have no philosophical objection to your position, but it is utopian. The gains would never outweigh the horrendous costs to switch away from "good enough" OSes.
And since broadband is as rare (or prohibitively expensive) in the region as snow,
On average, SE Asian residents have more access to broadband than US citizens do.
"Taiwan is not a country" is a lie repeated by as a matter of policy by certain high-ranking government officials to mollify the Chinese authorities. (Although calling it a "lie" is an exaggeration, because they don't really expect to fool anyone). President Bush got into some trouble once when he forgot to lie and mentioned on TV that Taiwan is a country.
It isn't "officially" a Chinese province any more than Kuwait was officially Iraqi territory in 1991. Somebody far away yelling that he owns your stuff has no real effect on ownership.
they've always been the most ardent supporters of Linux on the PDA
How can they possibly be the "most ardent" supporters when they don't ship PDAs with Linux installed? Other companies have done so, including Sharp, Agenda, and Yopy, meaning Compaq cannot possibly be in the top 3 supporters.
You won't be able to rip that DVD or burn or fry or copy whatever. Last I heard it *was* illegal.
True. The historical "Fair Use Rights" which permitted consumers to make limited copies of materials have been rescinded by the DMCA.
The code would be signed by the compiler. It is assumed that the compiler is trusted, just as, in a traditional model, it is assumed that the kernel in trusted.
What a ridiculus position. The kernel is assumed trusted because it is on your computer. The compiler is not on your computer, so it can't be trusted.
Or are you proposing that the all software should be distributed as source/intermediate code, and that only the OS kernel is allowed to invoke a local compiler on it before running?
but the MS PR machine will spin it around and make consumers think that it will make their computers secure
That's it! The reason why Microsoft has left Outlook full of known security holes for 4 straight years is to build up public frustration at "untrusted computing" so they'll have an eager market to adopt DRM!
Clever clever Ballmer.
That kind of ignorance is seriously dangerous. Linus himself has explained this topic in detail.
How would they force you to use such a thing?
They (the Evil Giant Corporation) compile Linux for you, and send you the kernel image (either included with the computer, or downloaded as a later upgrade). They have computed a cryptographic signature for that kernel, and transmitted it to the DRM chip (which only they can control, not you).
That chip will only load a kernel if the signature matches- if the kernel is on a short list of approved kernels. The corporation can still give the Linux source code to their users (as required by GPL), but those users cannot then edit+recompile+run the kernel, because it'll be rejected by the DRM chip.
Therefore one of the major benefits of Free/OpenSource software has been killed by DRM (and the new federal laws that make DRM possible)
PS. That's only half of the way they "force you to use the thing". The other half is the propagation of trust from hardware to kernel to application, which should be obvious if you read the EFF pages.
The idea of providing each computer with a secure cryptographic ID of some sort is pretty valuable to anyone concerned with security just as well as media distributors.
Not really. The threats faced by media corporations (who want their songs not to be traded) and individuals+businesses (who want their secrets not to be exposed) are too different for one solution to help both.
Any kind of "Trusted" hardware can be subverted or circumvented by a dedicated person with physical access. That won't bother big publishers, who only need to ensure that copying a song takes more effort than actually buying another, because the monetary damage from a single violation is small.
But if the transmission of secret schematics for your business is intercepted, the damage from that one incident can be enormous- enough to make it profitable for the criminals to spend a few weeks hacking hardware to accomplsih it.
If you depend on "Trusted Computing" to protect your secrets, then you're placing yourself at risk. If you only depend on it to retard the propagation of information you've already published, then you're reducing risk (not eliminating).
It's rather likely that if people start "Trusting" their computers to be protected, they'll rely less on passwords, and it'll be more common for a stolen laptop precipitating a full corporate download. Each computer already has a unique ID: the MAC address. Nobody uses it as part of any security schemes, because remote systems can never be trusted to honestly tell their ID.
You're correct about IRC; I've seen it run several times on SIPRNET backbones.
there's nothing inherently wrong with using proprietary communication protocols, especially when they're being used by a for-profit company.
.Net 7.x compiler system is also rather pricey, but I could squeak by with gcc prehaps.
That's where you're most completely wrong. Using a proprietary protocol is absolutely inherently bad. Especially if you're not in big business, but the millitary. I don't have time/space here to fully explain (but the links give clues), and others have written volumes.
practical reasons to not use this software do include the presence of DRM
Neither X_Bones nor Saeed al-Sahaf has given any explanation as to why DRM is impractical. In another thread it was pointed out that Saeed al-Sahaf's reaction to DRM was hardly more than an ingrained revulsion to a hated acroynym. (He immediately Godwinned)
I can think of one reason why DRM might be a negative (beyond the fact that it implies a proprietary protocol), and that is that it probably won't completely work. Users expecting protections that aren't really there may put themselves at risk. But maybe you can give some better reasons.
lot of money for something you yourself said could be done in an hour
In case you didn't pick up on this, Groove is bloatware, and only 15% of its features are needed by a normal user.
Here, I'll write one line that encompasses 60% of the features an average user needs from Groove.
25 6 * * * user rsync -e ssh user@ourproj.dyndns.org:/home/gruv/data ~user/gruv/data;chmod -R -w ~user/gruv
The other 40% functionality can be accomplished by 20-40 more lines. But of course then one more challenge is faced: convincing the network admin to allow ssh traffic. If he's smart this is already done, but if he's stupid it's impossible. So then one must turn to one of the many how-tos explaining how to pierce overly-restrictive firewalls. (It's quite funny that the main reason people are installing Groove is that it subverts their firewalls)
(even though the necessary tools are freely available on that platform, and better yet aren't tied to it)
First, I think I'd need an actual Microsoft Windows, which is non-free (and in fact 299 dollars). The
But then for every other user, the necessary additional tools are sshd, crond, and python. I could convince an average Windows user to install maybe one of those, but not all of them.
How about the fact that it includes Windows DRM? Or that it's just another arm of the Borg? That it's probibly just as insecure as Windows?
Do you know how goofy you sound, dismissing my practical reasons and then spitting out stereotypical Slashbot-isms? And you ignored my most important reason, the lock-in to an undocumented protocol.
By the way, Groove used to have a half-hearted Linux version. Wonder what happened to it...
Ther is nothing wrong with charging for software, and nothing wrong with building apps for Windows.
Ther is something wrong with charging a lot for software that does nothing I couldn't accomplish in an hour of python scripting around ssh. The needed functionality is so easy to achieve (since the tough part, the security, is handled by existing software) that chances are somebody else has already given away a free implementation. That's what I'm asking about.
If I were inclined to touch Windows programming, I might do it myself...
And if you regularly pirate software to use on government contracts, I'm happy they're locking you out.
Of course I never "pirate" software, I can hardly swim. And I don't infringe software copyrights either, as should've been evident by my attachment to "Free" distributions. But it's not up to me, it's up to the Pentagon LTs and CLs who carry the authority on these things.
The government IT people just can't handle license keys satisfactorily.
It's not the money... it's the actual holding onto the keys that they just can't do. They'll happily pay $40,000 to get software "improved" to include their requirements, then only be able to buy the $500 keys one month out of the year because their budgets have to be pre-allocated. Of course, they still have 4 keys left over from projects that've shut down, but they can't reassign them to another department because that'd be too much paperwork.
It doesn't matter if the per-seat cost was $5/year. The existence of a license at all is a real impediment to productivity. Don't even get me started on trying to install Product Activation-style license enforcement inside a top-secret lab!
"Uh no, I can't tell you my ip address or CPU uid. Well, I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you..."
dominated early on because they were better business machines.
IBMs were better business machines per dollar... back when the prime business apps were Lotus123 and dBase (plus later WordPerfect). Their main advantage over the Apple side was that a system with a hard drive (10-20 meg at first) was seriously less $$$ than for a similar Mac.
In terms of both graphics and processing, no competitor even approached the Commodore Amiga until the Intel 386 came out in 1985. But 386 PCs were still worse than Mac or Amiga, and more importantly, PC games able to take best advantage of the 32-bit 386 didn't come out until the 90s. By then, the 66 mhz 486 was out, and the "IBM Compatible PC" finally pulled (temporaily) ahead.
Some god-forsaken police or fire department leader is going to get saddled with yet another fraglie and tempermental piece of battery-dependent equipment that will serve only to force him to talk to higher-echelon bureaucrats instead of doing his job.
The uses won't be nearly as ambitious. They won't push it that far. It'll serve as nothing more than a propaganda-pusher for the DHS. Each Friday at 16:00 the chief will spend a few minutes seeing what new and informative safety hints the feds have stuffed onto his hard drive that week.
It's a grandiose newsletter-engine, nothing more will come of it.